


Too Late

by Desdimonda



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, Death, F/M, One Shot, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-12 00:37:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7077232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desdimonda/pseuds/Desdimonda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angela tries to help a child on the field, but they die in her arms. Genji finds her and tries to bring her from her stupor of shock and failure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Late

She was too late.

Blood covered her hands. Blood covered her arms, pouring from the wounds on the child. The child in her arms that whimpered, her eyes wide with fear, with the waning life that remained, falling so freely from her body. The cloth that hung from Angela’s waist was torn, pressed to the child’s chest, bound beneath her clenched hands as she tried to stem the flow of blood.

But she was too late.

“Stay with me,” she said, searching the girl’s eyes as they lost focus. “What is your name?”

“Asha,” she said, her voice small, almost lost beneath the background noise that surrounded her. The shouts, the commands, the familiar words of her companions, friends; the spray of gunfire; the screams of the civilians.

But it all dulled as she stared at the little girl.

“I’m Angela, Asha,” she said, as she watched the girl’s eyelids begin to close, her lips were pale, almost white.

“You,” said the girl, her words, breathy. “You look like my mum.”

Her eyes, closed

“No, no-” She reached for her staff, emitting it’s ethereal glow around her body.

But she was too late.

Her life lay spilled, over the ground. And for all the help her caduceus could bring on the battlefield, it couldn’t restore her lost blood. Not here. Not now. If you fell, breathless, to the ground, Angela - _Mercy_ \- could bring you back from the brink. But not like this. Not like this.

But still, she tried, the tip of her staff hovering the dead girl’s body, it’s glow surrounding her pale skin, stained with red.

“Come on, come on!” she pleaded.

But it wasn’t enough.

_Medic - Dr Ziegler - Mercy!_

Her name rang through the air, through her earpiece, and she fell back onto her heels, the light of her staff,slipping away. They needed her. But what good was she? She couldn’t even save a child.

“ _Dr Ziegler!_ ” came the call through her earpiece again. But it remained unanswered. She just sat, staring at the dead child, motionless, one hand on her staff, the other suspended above her body, stained in red.

“ _Angela where are you!_ ” came Morrison’s gruff voice, loud, desperate through her earpiece.

But she still didn’t move. She couldn’t. She would just fail them like she had failed this girl; Asha.

_You look like my mum._

Someone approached. A hand touched her arm. Knees, metal, scratched on the ground at her side.

“Angela - _we need you_ ,” said Genji, his cold metal fingers reaching out to her face. His words were urgent at first, but then, they slowed, staggered, as he realised what she knelt before. A child; dead. He looked from the child to Angela, his fingers glancing across her cheek, smeared with a stripe of blood. She barely even registered his touch. Her lips parted, eyes wide. “Angela - are you okay?”

“I was too late,” she said, simply, never taking her eyes away from Asha. “I failed. I failed.”

Genji reached out, both hands cradling her face, paled with shock, with fear. He pushed aside the shock of hair that had fallen forward, the strands of hair sticking to her lips, the red of her pout, gone.

“You didn’t,” he tried as he gently turned her around, away from the child, so she knelt before him; with him.“You did everything you co-”

“How do you know I did?” she bit, her voice loud, bitter, as she pulled away from the gentle hold on her face. “You weren’t here. You weren’t here to see me fail, as she died in my arms. As her blood - as her - as she-”Angela stopped, her words falling away as Genji withdrew his scorned touch. “She said I looked like her mother. A mother she’ll never see again”

“ _Angela! NOW!_ ”

The words in her earpiece barely made her flinch. She just stared at Genji, at the green of his visor dim; at the hiss of steam escape his shoulders as his hydraulics moved; as he reached out again, tentatively, to take her hand, bloodied, weak, worn.

“I see you on the battlefield,” he began, weaving their fingers together. “I see you disregard your own safety to help others. I see you walk the front lines, at our side, fearless, helping us every  time we falter - every time we want to turn back and run.”

She blinked as she listened, his words becoming all she could hear, his metal face becoming all she could see.

“When we need help, you are there. When we fall, you are there.” He leaned closer, sliding his hand across her cheek, the cold metal fingertips pleasant against her skin. “When we think we have nothing else left -” Genji paused and leaned closer, their faces a breath apart, her breath fogging the metal of his helm. “You are there.”

“But I couldn’t save her,” she said, her voice the breath of a whisper.

“Remember the lives you did save,” he said, hearing the cry for her help echo through their comm channel again.“From when you trained as a doctor, to head of surgery, to when you joined Overwatch, to your breakthroughs in nanobiology - to - to -” he faltered, drawing a thumb beneath her eye. “To _me_.”

Angela closed her eyes as she tilted forward her head, their foreheads touching, metal to flesh.

“You gave me another chance at life,” he said, quietly, leaning into her timid touch. “You give all of us another chance at life as you stand by our side in the fight, day in, day out. We all live to see another day, because of you.”

She opened her eyes, and stared into the green of his visor, into the metal that obscured his face. But she didn’t see that. She saw his face; she saw the brown of his eyes; she saw the scars, the crooked, playful smile, the thick bush of his eyebrows; the wrinkle of skin at the corner of eyes; the mole above his eyebrow, obscured by the shadow of his helm.

She saw it all, she saw her reason, she saw, Genji.

“We need you,” he said, lifting her discarded staff from the ground and passing it to her open hand.

And as her name rang through her earpiece again, she took her staff, kissed the cold metal of his visor and stood.


End file.
